


How Numb Our Fingertips Are to the Bitter Frostbite We (Don't) Deserve

by katty_tpose



Category: Five Nights at Freddy's
Genre: Flash Fiction, Gen, Light Angst, but tbh you can read it as literally any of the mci kids except cassidy LOL, entry for a challenge on FNaF Amino, so i took simply "the cold" and went along with it, sorry if it seems purple prosey :(, the prompt was "incorporate the negative aspects of winter into a writing piece", the story focuses on susie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28457382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katty_tpose/pseuds/katty_tpose
Summary: Children spend their afterlives, trapped in the cold, in different ways. Some spend it angry at the world, a burning vengeance in their chests that never dies. Some spend it in grief, sorrowing over their memories of the warmth they took for granted. Some spend it feeling numb to everything, eyes dilated and empty.One child, by the name of Susie, spends it doing all three.
Relationships: Jeremy | Missing Child & Susie (Five Nights at Freddy's), Susie & Cassidy (Five Nights at Freddy's)
Kudos: 6





	How Numb Our Fingertips Are to the Bitter Frostbite We (Don't) Deserve

**Author's Note:**

> crossposted on fnaf amino. i wrote a lot of my thoughts on this writing piece on my post over there, so if you'd like to check it out and shit then you can find it on my profile @ "kitKatty".

Young Susie wished she hadn't taken the warm for granted. 

A lifetime away, now, the sun was only some footsteps away, a window away, a glance away. She could open the door, step outside, and inhale the sunny day air and feel the rays of sunlight on her skin and clothes and hair, no effort at all. She could be oblivious to what she was feeling and casually talk with her neighbors and parents and friends. Even her dog could join her and carelessly prance under the sun, bask in the welcoming warmth. 

Even inside, without taking a single step, she could feel the heaters radiating that same comforting warmth, could eagerly eat the gooey, baked, and melting pizza and feel a slight burn in her mouth. 

She's not all too sure when exactly she transitioned from feeling a burning hatred toward her new circumstances, toward the everlasting and empty cold, to only feeling a sense of longing for the warmth that she'd lost, to not much at all. She'd shivered, originally, cried to Jeremy and Cassidy and Gabriel and Fritz and anyone at all who could hear her, and hear the chattering of teeth and sobbing frosting tears. She'd thought that if she saw a pool of lava there and then, she'd without a second thought jump in. 

Jeremy thought that a bit silly, why waste time angry over what you can't have, why refuse to adapt to your new life, and other words that young Susie wanted to scream and cry at him for. 

And so, she didn't say much about the warm to him anymore.

Where Jeremy had failed to reciprocate her anger and grief over the cold, failed to share her desperation for the biting air not to cut her ears off and ice the blood, failed to shiver and sob and wish themselves warm or dead, Cassidy had filled in. 

And so, the two girls hugged each other, ignored as best they could their ghostly forms, pretended as best they could that their efforts to drive away the bitter air succeeded in any way. 

It was only so long before efforts to ignore the cold had, to some degree, succeeded, Susie realized at some point in time. Their circumstances hadn't changed at all between when she felt the first chill stab her arms and that said realization, and no dance or hurrah or celebration accompanied it like she'd imagined. It was only another Monday for the children, another day in their despairing monotonous lives. Maybe she welcomed the adapting to the bitter air at that realization, maybe she felt more comfortable and felt the grief for herself lighten its load a few kilos. 

One realization led to another, though. The realization, then, that being comfortable with the cold was anything but normal, that being comfortable with the cold was a sign of giving up their hopes for freedom and giving up their feelings of angry resentment, vengeance, that this was their new normal, what they deserved, that the children who once didn't deserve this life now had to get used to it and abandon any chances of escape. 

What a horrible feeling. 

And so, she attempted to spark the burning rage towards the cold alight again. The spark, though, only flickered, only served to remind her of what she had — could no longer have. Sunny days, warm puppies, happy friends, melting pizza, a burning in her mouth. Every time she tried to grab the spark, tried to burn her numb and frostbitten fingertips in it, it petered out, just out of reach.

A vague feeling of grief then settled in, weighing down in the back of her mind, a pebble in her stomach. It never really went away, she doesn't think, only that it became ignorable with time. Ignorable, in a similar way to the chills in her arms and the ice in her tears and her frostbitten cheeks, and easier to live with. 

What a horrible feeling. 

But she felt it anyway. So hesitantly did she stop clinging to that spark, did she stop pretending to notice goosebumps on her arms. Hesitance faded to compliance to acceptance to an empty pit in her stomach accompanying the pebble weighing down. 

Cassidy complained of the bitter air, complains of it still, of the chills shocking her spine and and cutting at her neck. She tries for Susie to reciprocate those pains and the chills slashing her veins, to make weak attempts to fend off the cold. She complains of how she can feel every goosebump forming on her paling skin. 

Susie feels only a little silly, for her, albeit quiet, complaints being of the numbing of her fingertips and her body's lack of registering of any cold shocks or pain. She thinks, how funny is that? 

When she'd spy a flashlight or, better yet, a candle, she thinks, Cassidy must be burning inside thinking of how she's unable to run her hands through its fire, sear her fingertips, desperate for warmth. She thinks that she herself should feel some sort of longing, nostalgia, bitterness, grief. How she's taken the sun and its heat for granted, condemned herself to a lifetime of numbing frostbite. 

But, Susie moves on.

**Author's Note:**

> happy 2021!


End file.
